The Raspberry Pi: Designed for Children, Bought by Adults
Zusammenfassung
The Raspberry Pi was designed to address a specific educational problem: by 2006, British universities were seeing a decline in computer science applicants and a decline in the programming skills of those who did apply. The Raspberry Pi Foundation built a £25 computer to give children hands-on access to programmable hardware. When the first model launched on February 29, 2012, the website crashed from demand. The initial batch of 100,000 units sold out in minutes — almost entirely to adult hobbyists, engineers, and tinkerers. Children were secondary. Over 50 million Raspberry Pi units have since been sold.
The Educational Crisis
Eben Upton, a chip architect at Broadcom who was also an admissions tutor at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, noticed in 2006 that students applying to study computer science were arriving with less programming experience than in the 1990s. The reason he identified: home computers had been replaced by games consoles, tablets, and smartphones — devices that were professionally designed for consumption rather than creation. A BBC Micro or Commodore 64 in the 1980s invited a child to type BASIC commands. A PlayStation did not.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation (founded 2009) set out to create a cheap, programmable computer that would do what the BBC Micro had done: force children to engage with the machine rather than just use it.
The Device
The Raspberry Pi Model B (February 29, 2012) was a credit-card-sized computer with:
- Broadcom BCM2835 SoC (ARM1176JZF-S CPU at 700 MHz, VideoCore IV GPU)
- 256 MB RAM
- HDMI output, composite video output
- USB ports, Ethernet
- SD card for storage
- General-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins for connecting sensors and actuators
- Linux operating system (initially Raspbian, based on Debian)
Price: $35 (Model B), $25 (Model A, no Ethernet). The GPIO pins were the key innovation for education: they allowed physical computing — connecting lights, motors, sensors to a programmable computer — without specialized hardware.
The Demand
The Raspberry Pi Foundation prepared for an initial launch of approximately 10,000 units. They commissioned 100,000 units based on revised estimates. When the website launched at midnight on February 29, traffic immediately overwhelmed the servers. Both manufacturing partners (element14/Farnell and RS Components) crashed within minutes of launch. 100,000 units sold in hours.
The buyers were not primarily children. They were Linux enthusiasts, electronics hobbyists, professional engineers experimenting with embedded computing, and people who wanted an inexpensive server. Children — the intended audience — were a minority.
50 Million Units and Industrial Use
The Raspberry Pi has since sold over 50 million units across multiple generations. The use cases expanded far beyond education:
- Industrial control: Raspberry Pi computers control CNC machines, 3D printers, and manufacturing equipment.
- Home automation: Smart home systems, media centers (KODI), security cameras.
- Embedded systems: The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is used in commercial products.
- Server infrastructure: Small-scale servers, DNS blockers (Pi-hole), VPN servers.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation sells the Compute Module to commercial customers at scale. The foundation’s revenue funds educational programs in the UK and internationally. The device that was built to teach programming is now a standard component in commercial and industrial systems — related to the broader Open Hardware Movement.